Techmology ain’t your friend. We need more vigilance over what our lovely new tech toys are doing to us.

There must be better ways to design the tools we need and use. Perhaps the Center for Humane Technology has some ideas.

Silicon Valley is reckoning with having had a bad philosophical operating system. People in tech will say, “You told me, when I asked you what you wanted, that you wanted to go to the gym. That’s what you said. But then I handed you a box of doughnuts and you went for the doughnuts, so that must be what you really wanted.” The Facebook folks, that’s literally what they think. We offer people this other stuff, but then they always go for the outrage, or the autoplaying video, and that must be people’s most true preference.

I think the [traffic] metrics have created this whole illusion that what people are doing is what people want, when it’s really just what works in the moment, in that situation.

The Amazon Echo is a perfect way for the government to spy on citizens. Sure, Amazon rejects requests for the data but that doesn’t obviate the two big issues here.

The first is that the audio and data are recorded and kept. If it’s stored, even briefly, then hackers can get it. Especially state actors. The courts may yet force companies to give it up.

The second and larger issue is that we don’t have laws protecting the privacy of our data. We need regulations that keep up with changing technology. We need rules that favor citizens, not companies, and certainly not governements.

Asking politicians to stop lying is like asking magicians to reveal their tricks.

It’ll take all the fun out of an election, and ultimately we’ll wish we didn’t know.

NobodyisFlyingthePlane on either side. Running private email servers and deleting emails is unacceptable, but we have got to stop kidding ourselves about who we ask to run our country. They’re all devious by nature and we keep asking them back.

It’s sad to say but there are some bigger fish to fry right now than battling over private servers and missing messages.

Bush started a war over a lie for fuck’s sake. A lot of people died and nobody is holding him accountable.

Make a great no mistake we don’t need in vase privacy busting tools to keep the world a safe place. It already is safer than it ever has been and this trend predates even the Internet.

What we do need is a world in which private activities and communications are secure. We need people to feel comfortable saying and doing what they need to on their phones and the Web without fear that it will be used against them. This will have far greater benefit to mankind and the free world than spy tech that invades your phone ever could.

NSO can say they’re trying to make the world a safer place, but they are also making the world a more surveilled place.”
The cyberarms industry typified by the NSO Group operates in a legal gray area, and it is often left to the companies to decide how far they are willing to dig into a target’s personal life and what governments they will do business with.

The only solution against this onslaught of freedom killing software and the surveillance state is actually the government. People have to write laws that forbid this type of software and associated technologies. That won’t completely prevent this type of invasive snooping but it will limit it and give people recourse to fight companies that profit from stealing our personal and private info.

Another example of why health insurance and employment shouldn’t be tied together.

Employee wellness programs are mostly great, but ‘required’ participation is problematic. Requiring employees to provide private data and health info or fining them if they dont is not voluntary participant as required by the law.

Effectively employees required to give biometric info to participate removes consumer choice from the market place. Employees can’t move to other health plans which dont misuse their data without leaving their jobs.

Gathering and using your personal data against you isn’t just for the government and corporations. Researchers have always wanted to get their hands on your personal info.

The problem is when you don’t know that you or your data are the subject of a study.

We need some strong protection for our personal data and we need it now.

The staff here is a big fan of research studies and large datasets, but there needs to be some standards for how this info is gathered and used. We are not, however, at all in favor of manipulating people’s online experience without their knowledge.

Tweaking the user interface (or UX) is one thing. Feeding certain users bad news and then seeing if they get depressed is just wrong.